UCSB Historian Peter Alagona receives NSF CAREER Award

He will be studying the University of California’s Natural Reserve System

Santa Barbara, Calif. –– Four assistant professors at UC Santa Barbara have been awarded
National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER awards.

The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program offers the NSF’s most
prestigious awards in support of the early career development activities of those teacherscholars
who are most likely to become the academic leaders of the 21st century. The awards
provide a financial stipend to support research activity for a period of five years.

The UCSB recipients are:

Peter Alagona, history and environmental studies, for research on the University of
California’s Natural Reserve System and the role of biological field stations in American
environmental history.

Rouslan Krechetnikov, mechanical engineering, for research on self-sustained motions of
interfaces: dynamics, instabilities, and singularities.

Javier Read de Alaniz, chemistry, for research on advances in the cascade rearrangement of
furylcarbinols for complex molecular synthesis. In addition, Read de Alaniz will work with
outreach programs at UCSB in an attempt to overcome the lack of minority representation in
the sciences. He will serve as the faculty adviser for the University of California Leadership
Excellence through Advanced Degrees (UC LEADS) program.

Luke Theogarajan, electrical and computer engineering, for research on integrating CMOS
(complementary metal oxide semiconductors) processing technology for sensing electronics,
with a versatile single-molecule detector, the nanopore.

“Every year the NSF makes five-year CAREER awards to some of the best and brightest
researchers in the country early in their academic career,” said Michael Witherell, UCSB’s
vice chancellor for research. “It gives the recipients a chance to concentrate more on doing
great research and less on writing proposals. We are pleased that, once again, assistant
professors from UCSB had such great success in this very competitive program.”

According to the NSF, CAREER awardees are selected on the basis of creative proposals that
effectively integrate research and education within the context of the mission of their
organization. The plans are expected to build a firm foundation for a lifetime of integrated
contributions to research and education.

The NSF promotes and advances scientific progress in the United States by competitively
awarding grants and cooperative agreements for research and education in the sciences,
mathematics, and engineering.

hm 8/29/11